Free Comic Book Day 2026

 I went down to my local comic bookstore back on Saturday, May 2, for this years Free Comic Book Day. The story seemed to be doing good business. There were a lot of titles, and I picked up a few titles for myself and a few for my daughter. This is what I got:

Avatar: Legends/Minecraft (Dark Horse): My daughter and I are both Avatar fans, but she also likes Minecraft. This one is free in digital format, too.

Energon Universe 2026 Special (Image/Skybound): This one you can get digitally, but not for free. I've read the MASK story here. They've slowly been building up to the MASK series, which I'm not sure I'm interested in, but they've integrated it reasonably well with the existing universe. There are shorts with the other Energon Universe properties, but the only one I've read yet is the G.I. Joe stories that shows us whats going on with Hawk who we find out a few issues ago had been replaced for sometime by Zartan. We also get Zartan's origin.

Jem and the Holograms/My Little Pony (Dark Horse): A "Comics Giveaway Day" double feature, this one is a double-sided "flip" style like the Ace Double paperbacks back in the day. My Daughter has enjoyed the My Little Pony comics in the past, but this will be her first exposure to the 80s stylings of Jem.

Journey to the West (Manga Classics/UDON): This is like the Classics Illustrated of today, judging by most of the Manga Classics titles they produce, but Journey to the West piqued my interest in a way that Frankenstein or Jungle Book wouldn't. I'm going to attempt to get my daughter to give it a try. This is just part of the story, of course. The actual comic comes out in September.

Masters of the Universe/Dungeons & Dragons (Dark Horse): This is another book bills itself as for "Comics Giveaway Day," which I'm not really sure what the difference is. You can get this one digitally for free.

The Vintage Comics of Lulu

I'd mostly used the print-on-demand and independent bookstore site lulu for indie rpg stuff in the past, but I've noticed there are a number of vintage comic books and comic strip collections available there. Some are public domain, some are likely of unclear copyright status, and others are perhaps charitably classed as "abandoned" to various degrees.

Here are a couple of places to check for a number of 40s and 50s comics.

The Comic Strip Appreciation Group has a number of restored, vintage strips collected on their page.

Warlord News

Being a big fan, I always keep my eye out for comics news related to Mike Grell's Warlord. Most of the time, new items are few and far between, so it's kind of exciting to have two things on the horizon.

The first and biggest is the official word that there will be a second volume of The Warlord by Mike Grell Omnibus. It's scheduled for November and will include the last Grell issues of the original run and the first annual, plus some additional material. This leaves the 90s limited series and the 2009 series for a volume 3. I'd also like to see the remainder of the original series collected, even though Grell wasn't involved, but that's just me.

Also, the current World's Finest series by Mark Waid and Adrián Gutiérrez is slated to have a 3-part Skartaris arc starting in May with issue 51. Check out the covers by Dan Mora of the 3 issues here:

More Bronze Age Justice League

 

DC is soliciting a Justice League of America: The Bronze Age Omnibus Volume 4 for October. This collects issues published in 1980-1982 and features the work of Conway and other writers, plus a host of artists, including George Perez. In here is the Conway/Perez Apokolips saga, which I think first moves Darkseid from being sort of a siloed menace in New Gods related titles (if we don't count his earliest appearance in Jimmy Olsen) to more of a general DC villain. There's also the Secret Society of Super-Villains three-parter from #195-197 that I really dug as a kid (and it holds up today).

I've seen discussion of this on YouTube that suggests this takes things right up to the Detroit Era omnibus, but if that solicitations are accurate, that's not correct. Issues 207-232 (1982-1984) are left uncollected, some of which are more Conway stories, and Justice League of America Annual #1. I don't know if that's enough for a volume 5, but maybe they could find other stuff to stick in there. Hopefully, they don't plan to leave it uncollected.

The Warlord Omnibus and Paper Stock

Though I've mentioned it before, I haven't talked about DC's Warlord by Mike Grell Omnibus Vol. 1 here since it came out, which is kind of a lapse given how many years I spent blogging about Warlord! 

Anyway, the first thing one notices about this omnibus is how much lighter it feels than most. Opening it, you can see why: it's on a different type of paper than most omnis. When it came out, there was a lot of discussion of it being "on newsprint" with some fans angry it wasn't on the glossy paper they were expecting, and others appreciating it being closer in appearance to the original issues. Well, it isn't on newsprint, but it is on a slightly off-white paper with a matte finish. I'm sure I've seen some trade paperbacks from DC on this sort of paper before.

Here's some images I snagged from reddit:

And here's a comparison with the interiors of an old issue. The omni is on the right:

Apparently, this new paper stock is the wave of the future for Bronze Age omnis at DC. According to Near Mint Condition, the Swamp Thing: Dark Genesis two-volume omnibus will be printed on a similar paper stock (with (re-)remastered color to match the original comics), and the solicitation for the new 2026 edition of the Kamandi by Jack Kirby Omnibus says it will be printed on "period appropriate paper."

I'm sure some fans don't like this paper, but I feel like it is truer to the original comics, so I think it's a step in a positive direction. I'd like to see Marvel do this, too.

Spells Against Civility Progress Report

Jason Sholtis and I are still working on our 2-page comic for the first issue of the Swords Against! Sword & Sorcery anthology. Jason sent me the inked first page so I could start laying out the lettering, and that's what the images here are from, though there is a still some clean-up and shadowing to come on the art.

This is how it starts with the barbarian Karkath:

And this is how it ends for him:

Good Boy (2025)

I watched Good Boy this weekend on Prime Video. It's an indie horror film that I had heard about due to it receiving a bit of buzz (and some festival awards). The directorial debut of Ben Leonberg, it stars his dog, Indy, a Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever. The high concept here: a horror movie told from the dog's point of view.

In the film, Indy's owner is Todd, a young man suffering from some sort of life-threatening, progressive lung condition. After a recent hospitalization, Todd gives up his apartment in New York and heads for his grandfather's house in a rural area, a house that has been abandoned since his grandfather's relatively recent death. His sister says it's cursed and we learn that apparently more than one of their relatives has died there. 

Indy certainly experiences a sense of foreboding from the moment of their arrival, catching glimpses of a dark figure, moving shadows, and disturbing visions featuring Todd's grandfather's dog, who we learn has been missing since the grandfather's death. As Todd's condition worsens, and he pushes away both Indy and his siter, Indy has nightmares of being attacked by a figure drenched in thick, black mud.

The film is a bit of a slow burn, but it's only 74 minutes in runtime, so doesn't stretch things too much. Indy is an expressive and sympathetic protagonists, unprepared and alone facing the rising menace.

A spoiler but an important note for dog-lovers: Indy survives.

Now I want to get a bit more spoilery and discuss what I feel is an interesting aspect of the film. I don't think reading about this would diminish the enjoyment of it, but you have been warned...

When I first heard about this move, I assumed it was a horror film told from the perspective of the dog. And there's certainly an argument for that. Having seen it, though, I interpret it more as a film of a dog's horror. That is, it is a situation that would not necessarily be horrific (though likely traumatic) to a human but is horror from a dog's perspective. 

I think the apparent horrors we see depicted are mostly in Indy's mind. They are his interpretation of his knowledge of his owner's impending death. Supporting this view is the fact that the same sorts of phenomena Indy experiences in the supposedly cursed home, we already see hints of in the New York apartment. Indy senses the approach of Todd's death, and he personifies it into a tangible thing, a darkness stalking his owner.

You could interpret the film as having no supernatural element at all but instead visually representing the psychological state of its canine protagonist. In fact, statements by Leonberg encourage this reading, not exclusively, but as an interpretation he wanted the film to permit.

My view, based on the events as depicted, is that Indy can in fact see ghosts, but there is no supernatural monster or curse, just death and the fear of the loss associated with it.